Why is the one federal agency dedicated to revealing the unknown to humankind so difficult for many journalists to penetrate?

When the science writer Shannon Stirone was working on a recent feature for Popular Science magazine about what happens when people die in space, she had a simple question for officials at NASA, the nation’s space agency: Did they have contingency plans for such sad endings?

THE TRACKERThe Science Press Under the Microscope.

How to explain NASA’s seemingly reflexive obstruction in response to a simple question?

She emailed the public information officers, or PIOs, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for months. They are NASA’s gatekeepers, in charge of fielding reporter requests, directing them to scientists, setting up interviews, and (sometimes) sitting in on said interviews. When her repeated attempts to obtain information from the agency failed, Stirone filed formal requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These were rejected.

She then moved on to the Canadian Space Agency and its biggest celebrity: astronaut Chris Hadfield, famous for his use of social media from space. Hadfield came right out with the information: He said the crew simulated such situations, and that if someone died, for instance, on a spacewalk, he’d keep them in their suit and stick them somewhere cold in the spacecraft.

“He answered the question in a phone interview,” says Stirone, who added that even now, she could not understand NASA’s seemingly reflexive obstruction in response to a simple question. Stirone told me this story as part of a survey I sent to space writers, and asked them to pass along to others, to solicit a variety of experiences with and perspectives on NASA communications. Among all the federal agencies, which deal with touchy subjects like immigration, war, and the environment, NASA seems fairly benign, after all. Its vision for itself reads, “We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

But the same sentiment doesn’t always apply when reporters try to reveal the unknown about NASA itself — also for the benefit of humankind.

Love Undark? Sign up for our newsletter!

Email*

Chief among the duties of communications staff at NASA is facilitating media requests, but requests from established reporters writing for national publications are sometimes ignored or dealt with on timescales that, compared to the news cycle, are geologic.

When I was writing a story for Vice’s Motherboard site back in 2015, I needed a comment from someone at NASA about its process for astronaut selection. I requested an interview five times over three weeks before receiving a two-sentence statement from one agency PIO, and links to public webpages from another. A similar 2016 request while I was working on a story for Wired magazine received no response at all. When my subsequent piece stated that NASA did not respond to a request for comment, a different PIO contacted my editor to say she was “surprised” that I reported this fact.

She was, perhaps, the only one who was surprised. Another request I sent to NASA, for a Scientific American story about the agency’s funding for near-Earth asteroid research, also yielded silence.

While each reporter’s mileage may vary, I’m not the only one plagued by a slow speed limit. “I always anticipate having to wait for several days to hear back,” says a national space reporter who, like many of the reporters I spoke to, wished to remain anonymous to avoid making her relationship with the agency even less productive. All told, she says, the process is usually “a week from start to finish, which is unacceptable when I have a hard deadline.” Other reporters told me of responses that came after the story’s due date, a chronological hard-stop that PIOs knew in advance.

Because reporters know the NASA train arrives late, if they don’t need NASA’s comment, they sometimes seek out specifically non-NASA sources. The lags can also stop them from pitching NASA stories in the first place, seeking greener pastures that are easier to cultivate — like universities and their space scientists, who don’t always have to book their interviews through media staff, something NASA often requires.

Stirone says NASA scientists haven’t always been so unreachable, and that some even used to schedule their own calls with reporters, without the need for including communications staff. “Now a majority of scientists will connect to the PIO right away instead of risking a conversation that the center is unaware of,” she says. (The change seems to have come largely the past 10 months or so, perhaps reflecting the influence of the new administration. The agency is always a bit on edge during political transitions, since the budgets come from the new president, and new presidents have a habit of canceling well-established programs.)

Even if a reporter can see their way to an interview within their deadline window, the exchange is often monitored by agency PIOs acting as babysitters. Joshua Sokol, a Boston-based science writer, recalls one recent and seemingly straightforward story about the science of a new study. He contacted the NASA scientist involved, who then flushed him through to an agency spokesperson, who in turn delayed the interview to check in with headquarters.

When interview day finally came around, Sokol got a surprise: “Right as I was about to ask if it was okay to record so that I could transcribe quotes later,” Sokol recalls, “the PIO asked [me] the same question.” Sokol asked whether recording interviews with journalists was a new NASA policy. No, the PIO said: It was old, official, previously ignored, and now enforced.

These extra layers of scrutiny and handling inhibit both sides of the interview, Sokol suggests — and make working with NASA more difficult than it needs to be. “Once the scientist agreed to chat, it would have been nice to just … chat,” Sokol wrote in his survey response. “Like I do for other physics and astronomy stories with scientists all over the U.S. and the world, without the fuss.”

Not all reporters encounter difficulties. Alexandra Witze, a freelancer who writes largely for Nature, says she typically gets interviews within 72 hours, and that her sources don’t always bring communications staff into the conversation. PIOs rarely (but occasionally) give her crickets, she says. What’s her secret? Witze suggests treating PIOs like sources, instead of people who simply connect you to sources. “In terms of NASA PIOS, they vary a lot in quality, as is the case for any federal agency,” she says. “The way to get information out of them is to develop relationships and work them as you would work any source.”

“The way to get information out of them is to develop relationships and work them as you would work any source.”

Even Witze, though, didn’t succeed in demanding NASA’s information via FOIA, and the agency ultimately denied her request — and an appeal — in 2015. She’s not alone. While few government agencies have stellar reputations when it comes to responding to FOIA — EPA granted about half of the requests sent its way in 2016 and the Department of Defense granted about 35 percent — NASA is notoriously unresponsive at just 14 percent. NASA, too, has a habit of scolding requesters that is unusual for a federal agency. In my case, FOIA requests for a copy of a contract between a NASA center and an engineering firm, along with official/annual reports written as part of a contract whose number I also provided, among other documents, have included the admonition that the Freedom of Information Act “was not intended to reduce government agencies to full-time investigators on behalf of requesters or to allow requesters to conduct ‘fishing expeditions’ through agency files.”

Adrienne LaFrance, editor of TheAtlantic.com, has heard that line before. Among other things, she’s requested records from NASA’s Slack conversations, with date parameters. Her FOIA contact, though, said the request was too broad, and that LaFrance needed to include the names of the Slack channels she wanted to search. “The names of the channels aren’t made public, so that effectively closes off public information,” LaFrance says she told her.

Meanwhile, in July, I sent requests with identical wording but different contract numbers to the Air Force, the Army, the Government Services Administration, and NASA. The first three agencies are currently processing the requests. Only NASA asked me to stop with the ‘fishing expeditions.’

To be fair to NASA, all of the reporters I communicated with had positive stories of helpful PIOs, fast responses, and successful interviews. And all of them do productively cover the agency. But why are, say, the Army and the Air Force, which are dedicated to military affairs, often more open than an agency allegedly dedicated to revealing the unknown to humankind?

Perhaps because NASA likes its messages to be positive and apolitical, and because it’s constantly budget-beleaguered and, so, worried. “In many ways, particularly those relating to science initiatives, education, and mission achievements, NASA excels at providing accessible and useful information on its activities,” says Krystal Wilson, a former NASA contractor and current project manager at the space-sustainability think tank Secure World Foundation. “In other ways, especially those related to budget and human space exploration, NASA is more at the mercy of a cyclical political process.”

But, she says, openness should be one of NASA’s most prominent personality traits. “In order to achieve the secure, sustainable, and peaceful uses of outer space benefiting Earth and all its peoples, it’s imperative that NASA, as one of the largest space agencies in the world, be able to communicate transparently and openly about its short and long-term plans.”

With the exception of asking in an email to repeat the name of the publication I’d be writing this essay for (I’d indicated in an earlier voicemail that it was Undark), NASA did not respond to my request for comment.

See What Others Are Saying

Linda Billings

For those of you who are interested in the subject of NASA’s relations with “the public,” you may be interested in reading my paper, “Fifty years of NASA and the public: What NASA? What Publics?” It reviews the history of NASA’s public relations operations, which from Day One have been led by political appointees and focused on promoting and protecting the NASA “brand.” I presented this paper at NASA’s 50th anniversary history conference in 2008. It is available free online here — Chapter 7, p. 151:https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4704.pdf

Syd Wilcox

I have published an E-book that proves a great deal of box standard physics to be wrong. These are evidenced by FACTUAL experiments some of which are very well known to the scientists that deal with them. One being the Sagnac (correct spelling) affect which has been brought into the 21st century by the advent of the G.P.S. system, the Global Positioning System. How up to date do they need to be. I see out of date rhetoric being churned out giving the same old nonsense out as fact when it is obviously old and outdated and WRONG.

Please I beg you read what I have placed in my book, and witness my stance against what I feel is a systemic coverup. There are a lot of subjects that have a different answer to the box standard official answers. Take Mr Harlton Arp for example, a world renowned astronomer. He was barred from gaining access to large telescopes because the hierarchy did not accept what he was finding and reporting about red-shift.

Because his reports did not agree with old established theories he was chastised. This means that new information has to be bent and twisted to agree with old theories instead of accepting that the new information gives us a new angle on things and thus states the truth of the real and factual situation. In his book “Seeing Red” he has a section in the front of about 4 pages (from memory), and a complete chapter at the back called academia where he politely criticizes the peer review system. This book is an excellent read by the way and throws doubt on the big bang theory due to what has been observed of the red-shift

If you send me an E-mail to solarlibration@yahoo.com I will send you a copy of my book via E-mail which is critical of the whole state of affairs. You can find the book and thus the free bits which is quite substantial at Amazon.com The book is called “Not Relativity: Just Weird Gravity”, and the author is myself, Syd Wilcox.

RFritchman

NASA’s culture is infested by public relations people interested in protecting the Agency’s image at all costs. This behavior goes back to the start of the space race, when our astronauts were shown off as advertisements for the American way of life. The space program was another weapon in the Cold War, in contrast to the Russian program’s secrecy.

NASA has an organizational narcissistic personality disorder. It sounds like most PIO’s are afraid to answer many questions out of fear that the answers will be used against the Agency, with retribution befalling the PIO. The “justification” for NASA’s behavior may be a belief that any blemish or negative reporting will reduce their funding.

Science and exploration are about failure. Failure is hard and it does happen–get used to it! While NASA got off with admirable start without any fatalities until Apollo 1, two (Challenger and Columbia) of the space program’s three major tragedies are directly attributable to NASA management hubris, a “we-can-do-no-wrong” mindset that’s another aspect of NPD. In both cases NASA management poo-hoo’ed fact-based engineering explanations. It took Richard Feynman, a scientist with a brilliant reputation and exceptional communications skills, to blow through NASA’s Challenger stonewalling. It took a live demonstration of a 1.67 lb. piece of foam fired at 530 MPH to demonstrate how a piece of foam lost at lift-off killed seven Americans. Apparently none of NASA’s managers passed Physics 101, where one learns the relationship between energy, mass, and velocity.

Contrast NASA with Elon Musk. It’s odd that a taxpayer-funded organization is secretive and a privately-held business freely admits the cause of its failures. It’s one of the reasons I admire Elon and the SpaceX team. They work furiously to avoid failure and work even harder when it happens.

NASA has made inestimable contributions to space flight and rocket science. But a bit of humility would go a long way, and cooperating with journalists seems like a good way for NASA to promote the brand. But then PIO may stand for “Privacy Information Officer”.

vijee

When I had to do a profile of an AS-CAN , class of 2009, for Science Careers, I approached her directly
and then went through the formal channel at NASA after I had her yes.
For a profile, I was given a 15 minute interview — but the scientist was very forthcoming, so it was all good.

Never did get a response from NASA when I later contacted them to see when this candidate would get a chance to go to the ISS. She finally got a chance in 2016.

I have found the folks at NASA-JPL to be a lot more responsive about interview requests.

Ian O’Neill

I think it also depends on which NASA facility you contact. JPL, for example, has always been very quick to reply to my requests and scientists always seem to be on-hand for interviews. Other facilities are slower and I have had a couple of non-replies, which is certainly a frustration.